In a situation involving night visibility, or seeing through fog and smoke, it may be difficult or impossible to generate a useful image in the visible light range. Moreover, even if a visible light image is generated under such circumstances, it is often a low-contrast image, in which details are hard to identify.
In contrast, infrared (IR) imagery is very useful for enhanced night visibility, and/or for seeing through fog and smoke. However, the interpretation of IR images is inherently unintuitive, because the IR luminances of real-world objects are significantly different from what the human eye is normally used to seeing in the visible light range. It would be easier to interpret IR images if the IR color scheme was mapped into natural daylight coloring. However, in the case of a single-band IR image, it has previously been believed that such an image does not contain sufficient information to permit colorization thereof in a manner yielding a natural daylight color image in which the colorization is reasonably accurate.